People aren’t just watching cat videos and posting selfies on social media these days. Many rely on social networks to discover, research, and educate themselves about a brand before engaging with that organization. For marketers, it’s not enough to just post on your Facebook and Twitter accounts. You must also weave social elements into every aspect of your marketing and create more peer-to-peer sharing opportunities. The more your audience wants to engage with your content, the more likely it is that they will want to share it. This ultimately leads to them becoming a customer. And as an added bonus, they will hopefully influence their friends to become customers, too.
I would personally agree with linkshare.com as a great affiliate marketing platform to join as a publisher. Here’s why. Back in 2005 when I knew nothing about affiliate marketing and was using blogger.com as a free blogging platform without any experience whatsoever and joining Walmart.com as my first official affiliate program, I was able to insert Walmart affiliate in its in my blogger blog and earn a $72 commission. I was onto affiliate marketing for life from there.
Websites consisting mostly of affiliate links have previously held a negative reputation for underdelivering quality content. In 2005 there were active changes made by Google, where certain websites were labeled as "thin affiliates".[34] Such websites were either removed from Google's index or were relocated within the results page (i.e., moved from the top-most results to a lower position). To avoid this categorization, affiliate marketer webmasters must create quality content on their websites that distinguishes their work from the work of spammers or banner farms, which only contain links leading to merchant sites.
LinkConnector imposes a very rigorous and lengthy screening process, so you’ll need to prove that you have a high-quality website and established audience before being accepted. Despite its somewhat schizophrenic approach, LinkConnector does have some very happy long-term affiliates. And their “naked links” allow for direct connection to the merchant website without having to be rerouted via LinkConnector, which will give your website an SEO boost.
What many affiliate marketers do is find their niche in the market. This allows them to be focused on specific products or merchants, which lets them gain loyal followers and build a reputation that reflects expertise on a particular subject. After all, you as a consumer will most likely take the word of a person who has reviewed all kinds of vehicles as opposed to someone who reviews everything from sports cars to lemonade to fertilizer.
As an affiliate, you are drawing people in to your site, then redirecting them off your site in order to make a sale. In the short time they are on your site, you need to capture their email address or you may never see or hear from them again. A pop-up is the best way to do this. GetResponse lets you create pop-ups and lightboxes from within your account. See our post about pop-ups to learn how to make them in your GetResponse account.

It may seem like the same amount of work but it really isn't. You are not going to be able to advertise the same way as an affiliate. In fact, many platforms will not let you advertise affiliate products. That means you will have to put in much more work getting your pages to rank organically and doing social marketing, although there is less work dealing with customers. Also, the payoff will always be higher for dropshipping versus affiliate.

It’s not mandatory, however I do recommend having a blog down the line. If you want to get your feet wet by trying affiliate promotions across social media, that’s great. But social media affiliate promotions don’t convert very well so you won’t earn a lot and may get discouraged. Affiliate marketing works best when you build a brand about something you’re interested in / know a lot about / want to become an expert in and you really need a blog / site to do that. If you want to start small but with a better converting medium, try a weekly newsletter (around a specific niche / topic) because it converts much higher and gets you into the habit of creating consistent content. You will need a landing page to capture emails so I’d recommend buying a domain to set one up so you can later develop it into a blog / site when you’re ready.
William Harris is leading content at Sellbrite and is also the Founder & Growth Marketer of Elumynt, LLC., VP of Marketing and Growth for a top 700 online retailer and former head of Marketing for When I Work, a VC backed SaaS company. William is also a contributor to leading publications like The Next Web, Search Engine Journal, Social Media Today, and Sellbrite and a speaker at industry events covering topics such as marketing strategy, search engine optimization, content marketing, digital marketing, social media and personal branding. Follow William on Twitter (@WmHarris101), LinkedIn, and Google+.

He is the co-founder of Neil Patel Digital. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.

The digital marketer usually focuses on a different key performance indicator (KPI) for each channel so they can properly measure the company's performance across each one. A digital marketer who's in charge of SEO, for example, measures their website's "organic traffic" -- of that traffic coming from website visitors who found a page of the business's website via a Google search.

With offline marketing, it's very difficult to tell how people are interacting with your brand before they have an interaction with a salesperson or make a purchase. With digital marketing, you can identify trends and patterns in people's behavior before they've reached the final stage in their buyer's journey, meaning you can make more informed decisions about how to attract them to your website right at the top of the marketing funnel.

Now a customer comes along and orders one of your cases. They pay you $20 and you immediately turn around, contact your supplier, and order one for $10. You don’t do anything else. You give the customer’s address to the supplier, and you give the customer the supplier’s customer service information. The supplier ships the product directly to the customer, and you pocket the $10. If the customer has an issue, the supplier’s customer service department deals with it.

So you probably were able to guess the answer to which is better: drop shipping vs affiliate marketing. If you picked drop shipping as the winner, you are right! However, let me go through some of those reasons as to why drop shipping is more beneficial than affiliate marketing. (And it’s not just because I run drop ship stores and have a business called Drop Ship Lifestyle.)
The primary advantage of affiliate marketing over dropshipping is that you don’t really have anything to do with the product fulfillment process. You don’t have to connect with suppliers, you don’t need to handle transactions, you don’t need to collect money, issue refunds, or otherwise act like a store. All of that is handled by the actual store. All you do is, essentially, hand people your card, point them at the door, and say “tell ‘em I sent you.”
The links fit anywhere a normal anchor link would go. But, in this case, the traffic is tracked by a network or software and the content creator gets a cut. You probably have plenty of products around your home that came about as a recommendation after watching a cool YouTube video – it’s very likely they sent you to the site through their affiliate link!
Wow, Jeff! Fantastic article. Lots of great info to refer back on. You first came to my attention through the Profit Academy coaching & I sought your website from there. I love your very personal writing style. It is obvious that you are passionate about your work and care about people. You share top grade knowledge without the fluff. It is a powerful combination and why I listen when you speak. Thank you for gifting us the benefit of your insight.
Since you’re essentially a freelancer, you get ultimate independence in setting your own goals, redirecting your path when you feel so inclined, choosing the products that interest you, and even determining your own hours. This convenience means you can diversify your portfolio if you like or focus solely on simple and straightforward campaigns. You’ll also be free from company restrictions and regulations as well as ill-performing teams.
The merchant is the retailer or brand that is trying to attract users or make sales. The network is the store which contains offers for the affiliates to chose from and handles the payments. The publisher is the affiliate who is producing content that attracts users or managing the website that your ads appear on. The customer is the user who visits the affiliates website then is referred to the merchant website and converts.
I was able to make my first online dollars through Amazon Affiliate sales… It was never much and in the beginning I was just excited to make $10 in a month, which was enough for a free ebook or two. With regular updates and link inclusions in my posts over time I was able to grow the number up to like $300 a month–which I was pretty happy with. Of course the payout rates are paltry compared to a sale of an info product like one from Unconventional Guides, etc. Thing is, people seem to be more open to purchasing physical products rather than information products…